And how could you not? As much as I know I’ll enjoy the film when it hits theatres in October, I know it won’t last long or be well-recieved or good. It’s just not a movie that needed to be made, but I look forward to it anyway as a fan of the John Carpenter original, a fan of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and a guy who saw and enjoyed somwhat the Howard Hawks original original. The Who Goes There? story template is great, and even without that key casting I’d still look forward to it, even if it is seemingly just another in the line of horror remakes following the Wes Craven reboots of recent times and Friday the 13th and all that.

Horror is such a shitty genre nowadays that remakes don’t faze me. If original material turns out to be garbage like The Strangers, then I welcome familiar faces and ideas. I’ve come to peace with the fact that The Mist is the product of a brilliant filmmaker who probably won’t continue to dabble in horror (unless it’s Stephen King), and that M. Night Shyamalan is making some terrible, terrible choices years after his incredible Signs. Maybe it’s just fine by me because horror isn’t one of the genres I look for. I like horror/comedy, but I haven’t seen too many of those I’ve disliked. From Return of the Living Dead to Slither, the horror/comedy has been good throughout the ages, but I didn’t even like a horror classic like The Exorcist so how am I supposed to like its inevitable remake?

It’s a difficult genre, and I guess that’s why these filmmakers do it. Nothing is sacred, as people are bound to say, but I really don’t care about that. They’re not actively working to ‘ruin’ the original film, and the constant theory against the naysayers is that maybe attention will be brought to the old one with the release of the new one. Who knows? And that’s right – on some level John Carpenter’s The Thing was a remake, and it’s a classic, as is The Fly remake. Who’s to say that this new one won’t be? Aside from history and the formula it seems to be following…

In fact there are other things that concern me about this new movie. A long time ago I got into some farcical argument with a ’30 year old woman’ on YouTube.com, and it was on the video for The Thing 1982 trailer. Maybe you can still find it, I don’t know – I’m HeroOfCanton99, like Jayne and 1999 combined, the year I wanted people to think I was born in. Basically this lady’s stance was that she was uncomfortable with a girl being cast in the movie, because some seriously horrific things tend to happen to people in The Thing. I said “Damn it, I’m agreeing with you, you freaking moron,” but she didn’t really realize and continued to argue out loud to herself. It was surreal. Wonder what’ll happen when she finds out about the women in Gears of War “Curb Stomp Downed Enemies” 3?

I don’t feel entirely comfortable with it because I’m aware of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s history – three horror flicks, one where she gets killed, probably gruesomely. She’s assumedly not afraid of it, but I am. I don’t want to see that. I wouldn’t want to see it if it was anybody else, not just Mary Elizabeth Winstead, though that certainly doesn’t help. In The Thing, it’s not the character deaths that are actually gruesome: people die when they burn by flamethrowers. The terror comes out of the creature’s mutations, where faces split open and heads tear off slowly and painstakingly while tongues lash around and it’s the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen done to a human body. So awesome. God just typing that makes me want to watch the movie again. Really ingenious horror, and really cool sci-fi – the perfect blend captured here in this totally underrated flick.

If Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s head falls off and turns into a spider I might just vomit, but I’ve made a speculation as to what happens in this new movie:

The Swedish guy at the beginning of The Thing was a guy, not a girl. That means that she either dies in the helicopter explosion, dies earlier, or escapes to the mainland. I think that she’ll escape and leave the male hero to chase the dog and magically become non-foreign. Maybe that’ll pave the way for sequels… which is an odd thought. Hm, if they made a Thing remake trilogy, that would mark one of the strangest movie series ever.

That’s only a guess. Chances are she gets killed by a massive Thing monster, because I hear that we’ll see different forms of the creature, which is a good change of pace. Maybe one form will be Frankenstein’s monster, like the 1951 movie. HRRRNGGG…

Another issue I have is an idea resulting from a filmmaker’s passion for the original movie. When McG, a big fan of the Terminator movies, made a Terminator movie, he had a lot of visual call-outs to the earlier films, particularly the first. I didn’t mind; I thought it was cool because I share his sentiment that those two movies are totally sweet. But if the director of The Thing (I’m not going to try to spell his name) also does this visual homage deal and has similar things happen, for some reason I don’t see it as working, perhaps because of the proximity to this story to the 1982 one.

In other words, won’t it be silly if the crew of the 2011 had a blood test scene if only days later a different crew did? Eh it’s a nerdy complaint, but that’s why it’s an issue and not a problem, I guess. Also, will this movie take place in 1982? Or will it be like Casino Royale (2006) and take place in the future of the 60’s Bond films, despite its chronology as first in the series?

So that’s it. If Avatar and Machete were the most anticipated movies of years previous, well, that’s not a good track record, so The Thing better work out because I definitely look forward to it more than… Captain America? If they do things similar to the 1982 movie I don’t see much margin for error, but that’s probably what was said about The Phantom Menace. Well, that’s definitely what was said.

4 comments

I don’t like the cynical attitude that you alluded to: “Sure, it’ll suck, but at least people will watch the original!” Just accepting that a movie will suck is a lousy attitude, but how many fans of the Dawn of the Dead remake started giving a crap about Romero’s film?

I also don’t like how people dismiss remakes reflexively, as if they’re never good, especially when the original movie they cherish so much is a remake itself. (Yes, I know the new version of The Thing is a prequel, but it’s a remake for all intents and purposes.) The Thing is my favorite horror film, but I just can’t get worked up about this movie. Maybe if I knew that Michael Bay was directing it or something, but I have absolutely no reason to approach it with any negativity.

My prediction for Winstead is that she’ll sacrifice herself by setting off a bomb intended to wipe out the Thing, but a little of it escapes, becoming the dog seen at the beginning of the Carpenter film. Oh, and I read an interview with someone, maybe the director, of the remaquel who said that the characters do indeed come up with a way to test for who’s a Thing, but it’s not the same blood test from the original film. And yes, it’ll take place in 1982. They’ve said that it ends right where the original film begins, in the helicopter chasing the dog.

I wouldn’t say I’m worked up over the new movie, I’m just past the point of being ‘cautiously optimistic’ for a movie like this. Not only is it a modern horror movie, but it’s a remake, a debut film (I believe), and the product of less-than-artistic intentions in terms of the producers. There’s no saying it’ll be definitively bad, but I’m going on history here, and there are rarely good movies to come out of that formula.

Regardless, I know I’ll still enjoy it, but it’ll probably be on the B-movie level that I think the 1982 version transcends. Whether or not the movie is good like The Mist or bad like Final Destination 3 is ultimately inconsequential to my personal enjoymet, but that doesn’t factor out the huge possibility that it’ll be an enjoyment with qualifications.

Even knowing how cynical my fellow movie geeks can be, the utter hatred directed toward this film by pretty much every movie website on the net is really surprising to me. If you want to read endless complaining about how CGI is ruining horror movies, just do a Google search for this movie.

It’s being treated like pro-Hitler propaganda or something. I don’t know what’s more effective at making me disillusioned with the geek community: placing completely undeserving movies like The Dark Knight on a pedestal, or this kind of knee-jerk, foaming at the mouth negativity.

Dude… I’ve been dying to see that jam ever since I saw it on Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Twitter… but the wireless Internet in this college dorm can’t do anything half worth a damn so I’ll have to wait

I actually thought the initial trailer, which I did see, was pretty good. I hold that this’ll be a difficult story to screw up, but I’m not gonna get myself all up in a tizzy like I did back in ’08 for Hellboy 2… bad memories…